Land Use Policy Tree Farms

Land Use Policy 26 (2009) 545–550 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Land Use Policy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/landusepol Tree farms: Driving forces and regional patterns in the global expansion of forest plantations Thomas K. Rudel ∗ Department of Human Ecology, Rutgers University, 55 Dudley Road, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, United States article info abstract Article history: People have planted trees in rural places with increasing frequency during the past two decades, but the Received 21 November 2007 circumstances in which they plant and the social forces inducing them to plant remain unclear. While Accepted 7 August 2008 forests that produce wood for industrial uses comprise an increasing number of the plantations, most of the growth has occurred in Asia where plantations that produce wood for local consumption remain Keywords: important. Explanations for these trends take economic, political, and human ecological forms. Growth Forest plantations in urban and global markets for forest products, coupled with rural to urban migration, may spur the Forest transition conversion of fields into tree farms. Government programs also stimulate tree planting. These programs Tree farms Rural to urban migration occur frequently in nations with high population densities. Quantitative, cross-national analyses suggest that these forces combine in regionally distinctive ways to promote the expansion of forest plantations. In Africa and Asia plantations have expanded most rapidly in nations with densely populated rural districts, rural to urban migration, and government policies that promote tree planting. In the Americas and Oceania plantations have expanded rapidly in countries with relatively stable rural populations, low densities, and extensive tracts of land in pasture. If, as anticipated, the growing concern with global warming spurs further expansion in forest plantations in an effort to sequester carbon, questions about their social and ecological effects should become more pressing. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction plantations producing wood for industrial purposes have grown especially rapidly (Del Lungo et al., 2001). Landowners who decide to plant trees engage in an unusual As these people planted orderly rows of trees on more land dur- form of agriculture. Compared to row crops, planted trees grow ing the last two decades of the 20th century, controversies over the better on sloped land, require significantly less labor, and yield effects of tree farms on rural societies and ecologies grew louder. very little financial return for the first 7 or 8 years after plant- Advocates for tree farms (Victor and Ausubel, 2000) pointed to the ing (Bentley, 1989). For these reasons landowners only create tree very high rates of wood production achieved on model plantations farms under a select set of conditions. Forest plantations currently in the tropics like the Aracruz holding in Brazil (Marchak, 1995) make up only about 5% of the world’s forests, but they have been and argued that these ‘fastwood’ farms can deliver important eco- increasing rapidly in extent. Between 1980 and 2000 the extent of nomic and environmental services. By meeting market demands forest plantations increased sevenfold in developing countries (Del for paper products from pulpwood, forest plantations lower the Lungo et al., 2001). A wide variety of landholders have established price for pulpwood and, in so doing, reduce the economic incen- plantations. Smallholders in Africa created woodlots behind their tives to log natural forests (Kohlin and Parks, 2001). The rapid rates houses (Fortmann and Bruce, 1988; Tiffen et al., 1994). Corporations of growth achieved on tropical tree plantations also enable them to have planted extensive tree farms in Australia, North America, and sequester appreciable amounts of carbon, enough that, if planted South America (Marchak, 1995; Barlow and Cocklin, 2003). Villages on a large enough scale, tropical tree farms could offset a substan- in mainland Southeast Asia have planted trees in nearby uplands tial amount of the carbon emissions from the consumption of fossil (Muller and Zeller, 2002), and state agencies have planted trees on fuels (Gibbard et al., 2005; Righelato and Spracklen, 2007). degraded lands in South Asia (Guha et al., 1984). This diverse assem- Critics see forest plantations as vehicles through which 19th blage of forest plantation owners may be changing. Since 1980 large century colonial officers (Peluso, 1992; Guha, 2000); and more recently corporate officials (Potter and Lee, 1998; Rohter, 2004) have deprived poor rural peoples of access to lands and livelihoods. ∗ Tel.: +1 732 932 9169x317; fax: +1 732 932 6667. The plantations also despoil the local ecology through the intro- E-mail address: [email protected]. duction of fast growing exotic species like Eucalyptus rostrata and 0264-8377/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2008.08.003 546 T.K. Rudel / Land Use Policy 26 (2009) 545–550 Pinus caribaea that, among other things, absorb so much water that forest industries covet large tracks of land because they intend to plantations of these species markedly reduce local stream flows take advantage of economies of scale in producing wood for large, (Cossalter and Pye-Smith, 2003). Since 2000 people have begun to oftentimes, global markets. Amerindians still use these lands, and voice an additional set of concerns about the ecological effects of conflict ensues. More generally, forest transition theory predicts planting transgenic trees in plantations (Petermann et al., 2006). that societies with streams of rural to urban migrants and growing These debates about the merits and demerits of forest planta- numbers of prosperous urban consumers will create more exten- tions, while valuable, leave unanswered some important questions. sive tree plantations. The literature focuses on high profile plantations in Brazil, Chile, While the urbanization–globalization hypothesis explains the and Indonesia, but the representativeness of these plantations expansion of forest plantations largely in terms of market mecha- and the associated political conflicts remains open to question. nisms involving individuals, another line of theorizing focuses on The spatial and social characteristics of forest plantation expan- government actions and the aggregated environmental effects of sion can best be appreciated through global scale analyses like forest plantations. Not surprisingly, the driving forces in this expla- the one offered here. Statistical analyses of these patterns provide nation are political. Government officials decide that the ecosystem an opportunity to assess explanations for plantation expansion, services provided by forests are important to the well being of the one that emphasizes the economic and demographic forces that society, and they create programs to expand the size of forests by accompany urbanization, another that focuses on political initia- planting trees. The most commonly cited environmental service tives to increase environmental services by expanding the size provided by forests involves flood control. Trees absorb water, so, of forests, and a third one that emphases high population den- at least in theory, when the headwaters region of a largely forested sities in rural areas. To answer these empirical and theoretical river basin experiences heavy rains, the trees absorb the water and questions, this paper presents a cross-sectional analysis of the reduce the likelihood of downstream flooding. When the rains fall extent of forest plantations in 2005 followed by an analysis of on cleared land, the water runs off of it, and the increased volume of changes in the extent of forest plantations between 1990 and runoff causes flooding downstream (Bradshaw et al., 2007). In the 2005. aftermath of damaging floods politicians want to do something, so they have put programs in place to increase forest cover. If the new Theory programs expand local supplies of wood and reduce a country’s timber imports, so much the better from the politicians’ point of Social scientists have offered several different explanations for view. the increasing extent of forest plantations. Economists theorize Government-led programs of tree planting have occurred in a that the recent growth in forest plantations of all types stems variety of contexts. The Chinese government accelerated already from increases in the scarcity of forest products throughout the massive efforts at tree planting in the aftermath of the great Yangtze world (Foster and Rosenzweig, 2003). At least one body of the- River floods in the late 1990s (Mather, 2007). The federal gov- ory, referred to as forest transition theory, draws upon geography ernment in the United States initiated a Shelterbelt Project of and sociology as well as economics to explain the recent expansion planted trees to forestall further dust storms in the Great Plains in forest plantations. Forest transition theory would attribute the during the 1930s (Droze, 1977). Non-governmental organizations expansion of forest plantations to shifts in market forces that occur (NGOs) with similar goals of environmental improvement fre- with the urbanization of societies and the globalization of forest quently complement and strengthen these state led efforts at products markets (Rudel et al., 2005). The concentration of people landscape transformation (Brechin, 1997). This sequence of events in cities raises

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